Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth—and How They Confirm the Gospel Accounts

By Robert J. Hutchinson

For more than a century, Bible scholars and university researchers have been systematically debunking what ordinary Christians believed about Jesus of Nazareth. But what if the most recent Biblical scholarship actually affirmed the New Testament? What if Jesus was not a Zealot revolutionary, or a Greek Cynic philosopher, or a proto-feminist Gnostic, but precisely what he claimed to be: the divine Son of Man prophesied in the Book of Daniel who gave his life as a ransom for many? What if everything the Gospels say about Jesus of Nazareth—his words, his deeds, his plans—turned out to be true? Searching for Jesus changes “what if?” to “what is,” debunking the debunkers and showing how the latest scholarship supports orthodox Christian belief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9780718018498

Robert J. Hutchinson

Robert J. Hutchinson is an award-winning writer and author who studied philosophy as an undergraduate, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew, and earned a graduate degree in New Testament. Hutchinson’s most recent book is Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth, an overview of recent archaeological finds and new developments in biblical scholarship that are calling into question much of what skeptical scholars have assumed and asserted about Jesus over the past two centuries.

Book preview

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For more than a century, Bible scholars and university researchers have been systematically debunking much of what ordinary Christians thought they knew about Jesus of Nazareth. Every Christmas and Easter over the years, educated Christians grew accustomed to reading magazine cover stories and seeing TV documentaries purporting to demonstrate that most traditional beliefs about Jesus are not merely fairy tales but outright fabrications.

But what if a lot of what we have been told about the historical Jesus of Nazareth—many of the academic orthodoxies we’ve heard over the decades from university experts and media sources—turned out to be . . . false?

What if parts of the New Testament were actually composed by eyewitnesses to the events, perhaps even when Jesus was living in Galilee?

What if Jesus was not a Zealot revolutionary . . . or a Greek Cynic philosopher . . . or a proto-feminist Gnostic . . . but precisely who he claimed to be, the divine Son of Man prophesized in the book of Daniel, who gave his life as a ransom for many?

What if some people in Jesus’ time and place knew precisely what that meant—and, contrary to what Christians have been told for the past two hundred years by scholars, were actually expecting a suffering and dying messiah who would redeem the world?

In short: What if everything the Gospels say about Jesus of Nazareth—his words, his deeds, his plans—actually turned out to be . . . true?

This is a book about new discoveries in the search for Jesus of Nazareth. It’s an overview of recent archaeological finds and new developments in biblical scholarship that are calling into question much of what skeptical scholars have assumed and asserted about Jesus over the past two centuries.

It argues that many of the scientific or scholarly ideas about Jesus paraded in the media every Christmas and Easter are increasingly obsolete, based on assumptions, theories, and unproven hypotheses that are, in some cases, more than a century old and which have been superseded by more recent research.

Among the recent developments discussed in this book are:

• the 2012 announcement of the discovery of seven previously unknown New Testament papyri—one of which, from the gospel of Mark, may date to the first century;

• the 2009 discovery of a first-century stone house in Nazareth that refutes one of the key arguments used by those who say Jesus never existed;

• a young secular scholar in the UK who recently argued that the gospel of Mark was written not forty or fifty years after Jesus’ death, as many scholars have claimed for at least a century, but more like five or ten;

• recent excavations in Israel that have uncovered archaeological proof of the existence of key figures mentioned in the New Testament, including the high priest Caiaphas and possibly James the Just;

• new research that suggests belief in Jesus as a divine savior arose very early, within a year or two of the crucifixion, not fifty to one hundred years later as academic researchers used to claim in the twentieth century;

• the recently discovered Hebrew-language tablet dating back to the early first century that speaks about a messiah who would suffer, die, and perhaps rise again in three days;

• Jewish experts who insist that the Gospels show Jesus was not an illiterate peasant, as some historians and popular writers have claimed, but was likely a highly trained and knowledgeable rabbi;

• leading New Testament researchers who are now challenging the notion that Jesus was a zealot who sympathized with efforts to overthrow Roman rule (and who point out that Jesus’ followers were not arrested with him and were allowed to operate openly in Jerusalem for decades after his death—something that would have been impossible had the Roman authorities really believed Jesus approved of insurrection);

• a top New Testament scholar in the UK who insists that the Gospel accounts are based on eyewitness testimony tied to named individuals, not based on anonymous reports that circulated over decades as scholars once thought;

• new studies that argue the Gospels’ version of the crucifixion—that Jesus was arrested on trumped-up charges of sedition because he openly challenged temple authorities—may be far more historically accurate than previously believed; and

• the growing recognition that the Gnostic Gospels the Christian church allegedly suppressed were actually written one hundred to three hundred years after Jesus, and are in some cases openly misogynistic.

In the end, these new discoveries are causing some experts to wonder if the basic portrait of Jesus in the Gospels is far more plausible than the elaborate reconstructions created by academic skeptics over the past 150 years.

In other words, the New Testament may be truer than we thought, and Jesus of Nazareth, rather than being smaller than the Gospels portray him, may actually be much bigger . . . and far more interesting.

—Robert J. Hutchinson

Jerusalem, July 2014

INTRODUCTION

"I truly understand that God shows no partiality,

but in every nation anyone who fears him and

does what is right is acceptable to him."

—ACTS 10:34–35 NRSV

It’s a warm, sunny day in northern Israel, and I am sitting on the railing of a fishing boat from Kibbutz Ginosar as we slowly make our way along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Behind us, on the burnt-brown hills that rise up sharply from the lake, we can see the resort town of Tiberias, originally built by the first-century Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, with block after block of new condominium developments climbing like ivy up the ridges behind it. In front of us, the Sea of Galilee remains the same as I remember it when I lived here decades earlier. In fact, the Kinneret, as it is known in Hebrew, looks like it couldn’t be all that much different from what it was like in the time of Jesus, although the shoreline of the lake has changed and some archaeologists claim the region was once much more lush than it is today.

The biblical village of Bethsaida, for example—the hometown of the apostles Philip, Andrew, and Peter, now being excavated by Israeli and American archaeologists—was discovered about a mile (1.5 kilometers) inland from the Sea of Galilee’s current shoreline. No one realized the shoreline had changed that much. In fact, the discovery of Bethsaida happened almost by accident. On the other hand, Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted hometown (Matt. 9:1), is still found right on the shoreline of the lake. A new church (nicknamed the spaceship because of its ultramodern design) has been built directly over a first-century house that archaeologists are confident was the home of the apostle Peter and his mother-in-law, and where Jesus stayed on occasion (Mark 1:29–30). Archaeologists have unearthed the rough stone insula, or housing blocks, where dozens of extended families lived, as well as a well-preserved synagogue from the fourth or fifth century AD.

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Few pilgrims can take a boat trip on the Sea of Galilee and not be transformed by it. Very quickly, the stories in the Gospels come alive as you see where everything took place. As the old holyland joke has it, if it didn’t happen here it happened a hundred yards from here.

I walk to the stern of the boat and talk to the captain. He is a wizened old kibbutznik with skin the color of saddle leather, dressed from head to toe in royal-blue work clothes. "Mishahu amar lee shay-ain harbay dagim be-kinneret achshav, I tell the captain in my rusty Hebrew. Someone told me that there aren’t many fish left in the lake."

He snorts derisively in traditional Israeli fashion.

Whoever told you that doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the captain curtly replies. As the lake recedes, the fish move into deeper water. The Kinneret is full of fish. He adds that only two hundred fishing licenses are given out at a time, and that fishing is heavily regulated to maintain the fish population.

The Sea of Galilee is a decent-sized lake, about seven miles across and thirteen miles long (thirteen by twenty kilometers), with a maximum depth of about one hundred thirty feet (forty meters). The air is warm but the winds are remarkably strong, with small whitecaps buffeting the shoreline. I can’t help but think of the scene in the Gospels where the apostles are out on the lake, Jesus falls asleep, and a storm threatens to capsize the boat. At Ginosar, they’ve built a modern museum just to house the ruins of a first-century fishing boat, known as the Jesus Boat, discovered in the lake mud in 1986.

Looking back at the lush shoreline, I marvel at how much of the gospel story took place in this small, still quite rural area. The Mount of the Beatitudes, the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount, looms directly above us, a small clump of trees on a brown ridge. Below that is Tabgha, the meadow area where local Christians believe Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes. Coming to Ginosar, I passed the new development of Magdala, likely the hometown of Mary Magdalene and where a first-century synagogue was discovered in 2009. Just north of the lake, up the Wadi Kerazeh, lies the biblical town once known as Chorazin, which Jesus denounced for its rejection of his message (Matt. 11:21–24). And across the lake, the Golan Heights loom. In the northern Golan lie Caesarea Philippi and the enormous rock cliff that was once the shrine of the Greek god Pan, where the Gospels suggest Jesus proclaimed Simon bar Jonah the rock (Aramaic kepha) upon which he would build his new kingdom community.

DISCOVERING THE CARPENTER OF NAZARETH

I’ve been fascinated by the person and adventures of Jesus of Nazareth my entire life. I always felt that there must have been a lot more to the story than we read in the Gospels, not less. Whatever else Jesus may have been, I recognized in him a figure of enormous power and influence. When I was young, what I admired about Jesus more than anything else was his raw guts and fundamental decency. I was particularly struck by the way he stood up to an angry mob that was about to stone a woman to death for adultery. I read this passage over and over, imagining the scene in my mind. I now know that this pericope (passage) is not found in the earliest Greek manuscripts we have of John’s gospel, and some translations, such as the scholarly New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), now include it only in brackets (7:53–8:11). Nevertheless, it is so characteristic of Jesus that some experts believe it reflects a genuine event that was perhaps part of the Lukan source material and added to the text of John in the early third century. There are many learned monographs written on just this subject.¹

When I was twelve, however, I knew nothing of all that. I was just impressed by Jesus staring down the mob with the sheer force of human decency. So much of Jesus’ character, as revealed throughout the New Testament, is encapsulated in this brief passage: his concern for the oppressed and scorned, his willingness to forgive seventy times seven times (Matt. 18:22 NKJV), his courage, his readiness to stand up against unjust authority, his defiance of legalism. This passage also had everything a young boy’s imagination could want: Sex (a woman caught in the very act of adultery). Defiance of authority. The threat of violence. Also, it made me curious. This wasn’t some boring minister droning on. Whoever this Jesus was, he was definitely different. What else did he say? What else did he do? I began to pay more attention, and I began to read. I wanted to know more about Jesus’ life and times—how he lived, where he lived.

I turned, first, to a sensationalistic novel by a writer of historical fiction named Frank Yerby. I am not particularly proud of the fact that my introduction to critical biblical studies came through the work of a pulp fiction writer, but God works in mysterious ways, so they say, and that was how he worked in my case. The name of the novel was Judas, My Brother. Published in 1968, when I was only eleven, Judas, My Brother was part of a century-old genre that attempted to reconstruct the events of the New Testament on purely naturalistic terms and to tell the reader what really happened. Around the same time, Irving Wallace published the steamy novel The Word, about the discovery of a lost Gospel that would ostensibly, or so its cover jacket proclaimed, blow the lid off orthodox Christianity. It was The Da Vinci Code of its day. Rather strangely for a novel, Judas, My Brother came with footnotes and went out of its way to ground its many dotty historical assertions on something like scholarship—or what seemed like scholarship to a bright-eyed twelve-year-old. The book relied rather uncritically on the work of the early-twentieth-century Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner, but it introduced me, for the first time, to scholarly books and ancient sources about the life and times of Jesus—including the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the Mishnah, Emil Schürer, and even, I am amazed to see now, the respected Jewish New Testament scholar Geza Vermes.

My fascination with the character of Jesus, as well as his life and times, continued throughout high school and into college. That is probably why I never really rebelled against Christianity, as is common among teenagers. How could you rebel against someone willing to stand up to a mob that is about to stone a woman to death? Rebelling against Jesus would be like rebelling against Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. You might decline to follow their example, to be sure, but who would rebel against what they stood for?

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The archaeological excavations are extensive at the lakeside village of Kfar Nahum, or Capernaum. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus left Nazareth and made his home in this small town during the years of his ministry (Matt. 4:13).

My path to the academic study of the New Testament was thus the opposite of many popular writers today, such as Bart Ehrman and Reza Aslan, who embraced fundamentalist Christianity as teenagers and then lost their faith altogether when they studied the New Testament as adults. In contrast, I just accepted as a self-evident truth that at least some of the New Testament was legendary, that the tale grew in the telling, and that, as the great German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann said, it was virtually impossible to know what really happened behind the preaching—the kerygma—of the early church.² I was taught in high school that the infancy narratives were theologoumena—legendary stories that conveyed important theological but not literal historical truths. I considered myself a faithful Christian, to be sure, and still do to this day. But the historical-critical study of the Bible that Ehrman and Aslan found so shocking in graduate school I just considered, well, standard operating procedure.

IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

All that changed for me when I moved to Israel to learn Hebrew after college. At that time, anyone could come to Israel and study Hebrew for free, provided you were willing to work a little. In exchange for four hours of work per day, usually on an agricultural settlement known as a kibbutz or moshav, the Jewish Agency would provide professional teachers and you would receive four hours of intensive Hebrew language instruction six days a week for five or six months. I did two Hebrew courses, first level Aleph and then, a year later, level Gimel. You didn’t have to be immigrating to Israel to participate; in fact, you didn’t even have to be Jewish. In my class of about thirty students, however, I would say only about four or five were not making Aliyah (immigrating). The rest were Jewish, moving to Israel permanently, and the ulpan course was the first stage of their new lives.

For the first time in my life, the world of Jesus and the Gospels was not something I read about in books, but something I could see with my own eyes and feel etched in stones. The Bible really comes alive when you’re living right where it all happened. As I wandered the stone alleys of Jerusalem on my days off, or explored archaeological ruins in Caesarea or Nazareth, I felt like I was stepping back in time. Suddenly, these ancient stories, characters, battles, place names, foods, plants, animals, genealogies, and even obscure biblical laws took on real meaning. Israelis are fanatical tourists both at home and abroad, and even the most secular of them frequently go on field trips to visit the various locations mentioned in the Bible. They often begin to explore their country while in the army and just keep it up for most of their lives. As a result, I spent a lot of time exploring the biblical sites I had once only heard about from the pulpit—Megiddo, Mount Tabor (the traditional site of the Transfiguration), Ein Gedi, Mount Carmel, the Jordan River, Tel Dan, Beit Shean, Mount Hermon. My Israeli friends and I would set out in cars, or occasionally in small buses, and explore the countryside. On my second ulpan, I even shipped a motorcycle to Israel from Los Angeles so I could better explore the Galilean countryside.

I quickly saw how the biblical heritage is woven into daily life in Israel through the myriad practices and traditions of Judaism, but also through the geography and the language. Even something as simple as the Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming of the Sabbath, was quite moving. I remember sitting at a big table in the heder ha-ohel, the kibbutz dining hall, during my first ulpan, while the text of Genesis 2:1–2 was read by a teenage girl (in fluent Hebrew, naturally): Vah-yehulu ha-shamaim veh-ha-aretz . . . (Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. NRSV).

Even these nonreligious, socialist kibbutzniks kept the Sabbath, honoring the ancient commandment handed down through generations for literally thousands of years. This naturally made me curious about the other commandments, all those dry and seemingly bizarre laws. One of my Hebrew teachers gave me a book about the mitzvot, the 613 commandments the Jewish sages find in the Torah, and I spent hours in a nearby town library reading about them—and about how they are put into practice in modern-day Israel. I learned about the Mishnah and the Talmud, the great encyclopedic commentaries on these laws, and the Shulhan Aruch. I learned that, long before there was the Way of Jesus, there was the way of halacha—the way of Jewish law.

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Reconstruction of what the lakeside village of Capernaum, where Jesus lived after leaving Nazareth, looked like in the first century. The remains of stone insula, or connected townhouses, are still visible.

When I returned to the United States, I began to read Jewish writers who were then re-examining the question of who Jesus was and what his relationship was to the various approaches to Judaism that existed in his day. I eagerly followed the twisting turns and amazing discoveries in historical Jesus research that were then unfolding. In the 1990s, as a popular religion writer, I occasionally wrote about these developments for publications such as Christianity Today.³ I was particularly interested in the work of Jewish scholars writing about Jesus, such as the famous Talmud scholar Jacob Neusner,⁴ because during my time in Israel I had become fascinated by the Jewish roots of Christianity. Eventually, I became so interested in the topic that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in New Testament studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, an interdenominational evangelical seminary in southern California. For eight years after I had returned to the United States, I drove thirty miles two or three times a week to attend classes in Koine Greek, exegetical method, Near Eastern studies, systematic theology, and other, even more arcane topics. My fellow students and I would struggle our way through large swaths of the New Testament, line by line in Greek, trying to untangle the meaning of these ancient texts.

Of course, all this only makes me a semi-educated layman, as my professors used to put it, not a real expert. However, in the past few years I’ve been amazed to discover that leading experts in the field of historical Jesus research have been drawing startling new conclusions that are dramatically at odds with the skeptical theories I was taught in college and then in graduate school—skeptical theories that often dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even more startling to me was the fact that these newer conclusions were often not showing up in the media—even though in many cases they were being proposed by secular experts at top universities. In the TV documentaries I watched and magazine stories I read, the reporters often seemed oblivious to these new developments and merely repeated the older, hyper-skeptical conclusions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; for example, that belief in Jesus as a divine being only emerged very late as the Jesus movement spread out into the pagan Greek world. Yet every month, it seemed, archaeologists in Israel and biblical scholars at major universities around the world were announcing new discoveries that, rather than undermining the basic portrait of Jesus in the Gospels, were actually confirming it.

This book, then, is my attempt to bring some of these recent discoveries and scholarly developments to a wider audience. To do that, however, I also provide a little background on how academic New Testament scholars go about their work and how they arrived at some of the earlier conclusions that are now being questioned. By necessity, I touch briefly on and quickly summarize very complicated subjects—such as the development of source and form criticism—and I know these breezy summaries will no doubt make many professional biblical scholars, like my former teachers, shake their heads in disbelief.

Finally, a quick note on the Bible in general: In my own mind, I am writing for two groups of people: committed Christians of many denominations who have a wide variety of beliefs about how and to what degree the Bible is inspired or even inerrant; and, secondly, general readers who are interested in Jesus of Nazareth and early Christianity but who are not wedded to any previous notion that the Bible is based on real events. Writing for these two groups presents many challenges, of course, but I tried to steer a middle course and remain respectful both of Christian orthodoxy and secular skepticism. What’s more, most of this book is about what secular, Jewish, and not necessarily Christian scholars and archaeologists are discovering and concluding—and how their recent research is, to a surprising degree, supporting much of what the Gospels say about Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, this book is not primarily a work of Christian apologetics as such but rather a brief overview of the changing world of New Testament scholarship.

In a very real sense, this book is also something I’ve been working on all my life. It is a very personal project for me. Like any modern person, I have the same natural skepticism toward the miracles in the New Testament, and the strange talk of atonement in the writings of St. Paul, as my secular, non-Christian friends. But unlike them, I have spent a lifetime thinking about what Jesus of Nazareth was trying to achieve and a decent amount of time studying some of the very best contemporary New Testament scholarship. Having been raised on that scholarship, and taught in high school and college that parts of the New Testament were legendary, I was never disillusioned or shocked. Instead, I’ve just been curious—and able to see how many of our older scholarly ideas about Jesus are being aggressively challenged today, often by Jewish and secular experts who don’t really have an axe to grind.

I approach the effort to understand Jesus with what I hope is an open mind. Although I am a believing Christian, I have no trouble questioning many of the central assertions of historic Christianity, especially when there are good reasons for doing so. At the same time, however, I feel equally free to question the assumptions and unproven theories of contemporary New Testament scholarship, especially when there are good reasons for doing so. I view them with the same skepticism and weary familiarity with which other people view the doctrines of Christianity. What I find exciting, though, is that many of these unquestioned assumptions of New Testament scholarship are now being forcefully questioned, and we’re discovering that many of them may well turn out to be false. Jesus of Nazareth may not have been an illiterate peasant who expected the world to come to an end in his own lifetime, as so many contemporary authors claim. He may have been a well-trained Jewish rabbi who had a very specific mission—a mission to save the human race from itself. And therein lies a very interesting story indeed.

PROLOGUE

Here’s what our records tell us: sometime in the early decades of the first millennium, a young, charismatic Jewish rabbi from a tiny village in northern Palestine ignited a social movement that gradually spread across the entire eastern Mediterranean—an underground movement that, he said, would somehow change the course of human history.

His real name was Yeshu’a bar Yosef. We call him Jesus.

By all accounts, Jesus viewed what he was doing quite literally as a suicide mission. He told his closest associates that he did not have much time to do what he needed to do—and predicted his mission would get him killed (Mark 10:32–34).

And it did.

The movement that he was inaugurating, he said, was not about overthrowing governments. It was something far more subversive; it was about changing the entire world from the inside out.

He called this underground movement the kingdom.

Some modern Bible scholars claim that Jesus was really a deluded fanatic who expected the world to end at any moment in a great cataclysmic disaster, with God killing the many and saving the righteous few.¹ But that’s not what the texts actually say.

In the gospel behind the gospels, the hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings that scholars call Q, Jesus said the kingdom he was proclaiming was not about conquering armies. Rather, it was like a tiny mustard seed that is planted but then grows into an enormous tree (Luke 13:19), or like yeast that a woman takes and mixes with flour until all is leavened (Luke 13:21). It is, he said, good news, like treasure hidden in a field (Matt. 13:44 NRSV). He told his disciples to pass on to John the Baptist what the kingdom is like: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them (Matt. 11:4–6). The kingdom, he said, belonged not to soldiers and kings, but to children (Mark 10:14).

Jesus was also supremely confident, even joyful. He appears to have drawn crowds by the thousands—perhaps by the tens of thousands (Luke 6:17).

He told strange symbolic stories that lingered in his hearers’ minds for years, and in some cases for the rest of their lives. They were stories about grace and forgiveness, about mercy in unexpected places, about hidden treasures and lost sheep.

And in ways few people have done before or since, Jesus reached out to the most wretched and despised people in society—the demon-possessed, the deformed, those afflicted with horrible contagious diseases, prostitutes, tax collectors, even soldiers of an occupation army. He told them all the same thing: Your faith has saved you. Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace (Mark 5:34, 10:52; Luke 7:50, 8:48, 17:19, 18:42; Matt. 9:22).

In a series of carefully calculated symbolic actions—what we might today call acts of civil disobedience—this charismatic rabble-rouser set about changing public opinion pretty much everywhere on the planet. As a result of what he said and did, people from one end of the earth to the other would one day rethink everything they had once believed.

His influence was massive, and what he said and did ended up sparking a chain reaction in human culture for the next two thousand years, changing everything from the law and marriage customs to the conduct of war. If Jesus was only a mythical character created by the Roman Caesars, as one modern writer now claims,² he was the most influential nonexistent person in history.

Despite what many scholars say, Jesus appears to have had some sort of detailed, well-thought-out plan. Very quickly, he recruited a number of close associates. He specifically told them that they would be building a social movement (Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men [Matt. 4:19 ESV]). These men, in turn, deputized others to spread his message, and his movement, throughout the immediate area. He had friends in high places, including members of the ruling Jewish aristocracy, the Sanhedrin (Mark 15:43), and perhaps even the wife of the Roman governor who would one day sentence him to death (Matt. 27:19).

And he had a method: He chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in pairs to all the towns and places he planned to visit. These were his instructions to them . . . ‘Don’t move around from home to home. Stay in one place, eating and drinking what they provide. Don’t hesitate to accept hospitality, because those who work deserve their pay’ (Luke 10:1–2, 7 NLT).

From the very beginning, Jesus appears to have predicted that his movement would eventually extend far beyond his own people and time. We don’t know for sure if Jesus spoke Greek, the lingua franca of his age, but the documents we have portray him conversing with people from all walks of life and from many different countries. He certainly traveled far afield to the Greek-speaking, mostly pagan areas of Tyre, Sidon, and the Decapolis (Matt. 15). He spoke easily with a divorced woman in Samaria (John 4), which would be almost like an Orthodox Jewish rabbi today chatting with a Palestinian divorcée in Nablus.

Jesus predicted that his message would one day reach all corners of the globe.

And it did.

This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, Matthew records him saying (24:14 NIV). Of course, some critical scholars claim that Jesus didn’t make any such prediction; that this saying was created by Matthew.³ But even if this were true, Matthew wrote no later than AD 90,⁴ when the tiny Christian sect was in danger of being annihilated by homicidal Roman emperors. It didn’t look like it would last until the end of the week, much less for the next two thousand years.

To me, the great mystery and ultimate proof that Jesus was far more than a teacher of timeless moral truths has been this: the trajectory of his movement through history. According to Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion at Baylor University and author of The Rise of Christianity, Jesus’ kingdom movement grew from about 1,000 followers in AD 40, a decade after his death, to roughly 217,000 followers at the end of the second century, to almost 34 million in AD 350, after the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.⁵ Today, roughly two billion people, or a third of the earth’s entire population, call themselves Jesus’ followers.⁶

Many authors say that Jesus was a false messiah, like Judas the Galilean before him and Theudas after him, because he failed in his mission to redeem Israel.⁷ But if Jesus’ true mission wasn’t to kill all the Romans, as the later Zealots wanted and some modern writers claim, but to change the world—to spread his message of mercy and human dignity to all the ends of the earth—then you’d have to say that even on a human level he was an overwhelming success.

1

IS THERE EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY IN THE GOSPELS?

New Approaches to the New Testament as History

[M]any have undertaken to set down an orderly

account of the events that have been fulfilled

among us, just as they were handed on to us by

those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses.

—LUKE 1:1–2 NRSV

As an observant Jew, Jesus of Nazareth almost certainly made the arduous, three-day trip from the Sea of Galilee region to the holy city of Jerusalem many times in his life. In the first century, Jews would often make the trek three times a year, for the three major pilgrim feasts of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Weeks), and Sukkot (Tabernacles). According to Luke, Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, went to Jerusalem for Passover every year (2:41). It was a daunting journey—as anyone who has hiked in the Jordan River valley can attest—and a testimony to the deep faith of Galilean Jews that they would make it regularly. On this score the gospel of John’s descriptions of Jesus’ travels are probably more accurate historically than those of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke); John describes Jesus coming and going to the Jerusalem area many times over a three-year period. Likely for simplicity’s sake and to make their stories easier to follow, the Synoptics condense Jesus’ itinerary into two basic phases: his ministry in Galilee and his final trip to Jerusalem, rather than including accounts of his coming and going.

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A reconstruction of the Pool of Bethesda as it existed in Jerusalem in AD 65, outside the city walls. Photo of the Model of Jerusalem in the Israel Museum. Photo taken by Deror Avi.

On one occasion, according to John’s gospel (5:2–10), Jesus entered Jerusalem through the Sheep Gate, near what is today called the Lion’s Gate. Outside the city walls and immediately before the gate, there were two large pools of water surrounded by colonnades. One was called Bethesda or Bethzatha, where people came who wanted to be cured of various ailments: Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes, the gospel of John explains. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed (5:2–3 NRSV).

One of the sick people there had been ill, John tells us, for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw the man, he stopped and asked, Do you want to be made well?

The man replied that he was too sick to get into the healing water of the pool. Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, he explained. While I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.

Jesus looked at him, then said, Stand up, take your mat and walk (5:7–8 NRSV). And, according to John, that is precisely what the man did.

However, it was the Sabbath, and anyone who has been to Jerusalem knows that the devout Jews of Jerusalem take the rules for observing the Sabbath very seriously. Even today, there are special religious police with neon vests who walk around the Western Wall Plaza and tell tourists not to take photographs once the Sabbath has begun on Friday evening.

One of the prohibited activities on the Sabbath is carrying, or, more technically, transferring, something from one domain to another. During the time of Jesus and in the decades after, the rabbis were debating precisely what the Torah means by work. The Torah forbids work on the Sabbath (Ex. 31:12–17), but does not define what work actually is. The rabbis came up with thirty-nine categories of creative activity that constitute work—including planting, gathering, tying, building, lighting or extinguishing a fire, cooking, and so on.¹

Eventually it was also decided that carrying something from one dwelling to another was a type of work as well, and it was forbidden. To make life easier in communities with large numbers of Orthodox Jews, however, an ingenious solution was devised: an eruv. An eruv is an artificial household that is created by stringing wire or twine around a neighborhood, marking it off as a single living area. That way, children or belongings can be carried within it on the Sabbath. Today in Jerusalem, and particularly in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, you can see discreet wires with pieces of cloth tied to them strung around the city from pole to pole, creating the eruv. This is the world in which Jesus lived.

Now that day was a sabbath, John continues. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, ‘It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat’ (5:9–10 NRSV).

We will confront this highly sensitive issue of Jesus’ attitude to Sabbath observance and whether that put him at odds with the mainstream Jewish community in another chapter. But for now, what is interesting is how John’s account matches very closely what we now know both about Jerusalem and about the customs of the people within it.

WAS THE AUTHOR OF JOHN AN EYEWITNESS?

John’s gospel is very different from the Synoptics. It exhibits what